I doubt they actually want to do this.
They clearly see having a wide set of paying customers as valuable (otherwise they'd just raise prices) but if you are stuck having to make hard choice then I can see the attraction of this approach.
And where’s the difference between the Claude Desktop app and OpenClaw at this point? Anthropic have been hard at work porting the most important features. You can easily shoot yourself in the foot with both now.
OpenClaw and OpenCode are open source projects with zero warranty and nobody to sue if they have a npm Trojan in them
The risk with OpenClaw et al isn't that the software itself is compromised. The risk is that what it does is fundamentally insecure and Claude Code isn't any better
Once again, despite everyone's protestations about not anthropomorphising things, LLMs are, to first approximation, best seen as little people on a chip. So with that in mind, it should be obvious why enterprise would prefer dealing with Anthropic's official products than OpenClaw - it's similar to contracting a team of software engineers from another well-known corporation and giving them keys to the castle, vs. inviting in any randos that show up at the door on any given day and can pass FizzBuzz test. Even if, in both cases, these turned out to be the same people, having an organizational/legal-level relationship changes the expectations and trust levels involved.
When has any technology company been sued for pushing accidental malware in their updates?
The reality is that you have never had anyone to sue.
Having the ability to sue, and having the resources to sue is also not the same.
The amount of times I had to deal with support cases (as the reporter, not the handler) where I felt like the support person was actually incentivized to solve my problem vs just following the script is astonishingly low. Even with paid support. Paid support just means you get to follow their script faster.
Anthropic wants you to use their subscription only for Anthropic products.
I don’t think the difference is that difficult to see.